Skepticism & Spirituality in the Martial Arts

Pretty much everyone who's been on Bullshido for more than five minutes knows of Matt Thornton.

He's the founder of the Straight Blast Gym and a BJJ black belt, who spends a significant portion of his time helping to combat BS in the Martial Arts by promoting the concept of "Aliveness".

In this 45 minute video, Thornton skewers what he describes as "Fantasy Based Martial Arts", and the inadequate training methods which enable their practitioners to be delusional, and takes questions from the audience.

I hope I did this the right way but Sam Harris had this on his facebook, and I suggested you guys in the comments. I mentioned bullshido as a reference point and mentioned how I found my gym here. Hopefully it's not too douchey of a move or I'll delete it:BabyTroll:

I hope I did this the right way but Sam Harris had this on his facebook, and I suggested you guys in the comments. I mentioned bullshido as a reference point and mentioned how I found my gym here. Hopefully it's not too douchey of a move or I'll delete it:BabyTroll:

Not at all, we're happy to have people helping get the word out. Matt is a huge friend of the site and I told him yesterday that we'd feature the video here.

Matt looks like hell, did he go undercover for this assignment? Someone told him the 90's grunge style was still in on college campuses or something and he wanted to blend in with the right flannels and hair.

I like Matt, but he's still heavily biased and persists in associating "traditional" with "dead training". In Matt's world, traditional training is never alive, which is a silly thing to keep spouting in this day and age.

I get that he needs to pimp "Aliveness" wherever he goes but the constant bucketing of "this is used in MMA so it is always trained alive" vs. "This is a traditional art so it's always trained dead" is a false dichotomy that, quite frankly, is just as bad as any "fantasy-based" art.

I use Matt's philosophy whenever I train, if it's a dead drill (and dead drills have their place), I ask myself how I could train it more alive, and I credit Matt for that sort of thing. But he didn't invent aliveness, he just pointed it out.

Well that's kind of like saying "Phrost didn't invent 'Bullshido', he just came up with the word that succinctly encapsulated the concept of bullshit in the martial arts". Like me, I'm pretty sure he coined the term.

Well that's kind of like saying "Phrost didn't invent 'Bullshido', he just came up with the word that succinctly encapsulated the concept of bullshit in the martial arts". Like me, I'm pretty sure he coined the term.

He includes karate in the "dead" arts, but we all know karateka and styles who train alive. And in kung fu, and in etc etc.

At the end of the day I greatly respect Matt's ethos, but he's still part of the BJJihad; he's just disguised here as Eddie Vedder.

He did name his training place Straight Blast gym. A straight blast is not a BJJ technique.

The best part of the video is when Matt starts derailing a bit and drifts from MA and spirituality and starts discussing the artistic value of psychoactive drugs. When he started talking about artists doing LSD and mushrooms I suddenly felt like it was 1994 all over again...gonna put on some Mother Love Bone...burn incense....